Well, I must admit, I do feel a bit silly about my "Take that, Murphy" post. Murphy clearly struck back this year (and continues to strike back--as I've learned by getting stranded in the El Paso Airport for 8 hours today). But: no worries! I am confident that Murphy can't win forever.

On Sunday, Armadillo Aerospace had two last chances to win prize money in the Northrop Grumman Lunar Lander Challenge. After the incredibly close call of Saturday afternoon, when Armadillo came within seven seconds of winning $350,000 of NASA's money, we were all pretty hopeful. Like a lot of the Northrop Grumman Lunar Lander Challenge Teams, Armadillo is incredibly creative and just so damn good that it was easy to feel like victory was bound to happen.

Well, that didn't exactly happen. In fact, Armadillo didn't perform as well on Sunday as they did on Saturday, at least in most respects.

In the Sunday morning window, like the Saturday afternoon window, Armadillo started off great. They took off from their staging area on time, got out to the pads without incident, ran through their checklists and loading procedures, and took off for a beautiful flight. I was a little worried at first, because I could tell that the color of the flame and the sound of the engine were a bit different than they had been the day previously, but it turned out that these weren't issues. In the end, the vehicle made a perfect flight, surpassing all of the requirements, and landing just over a meter off the center of the pad.

Once again, it was on the return flight that Armadillo experienced a problem. At ignition, I heard a pop that (now that I was starting to get pretty calibrated to the sounds of the Mod) seemed a bit loud. The vehicle rose a few meters off the pad and paused, as always, for a quick systems check. Armadillo's spotters had heard the same pop that I had, and diagnosed the problem quickly--there had been another hard start. With some regret, I'm sure, they called for an abort. In his control van, team leader John Carmack called for a soft abort, and the vehicle settled down for an easy landing only a few seconds after liftoff. That was the end of Armadillo's third attempt of 2007.

To the untrained eye, that little aborted flight probably didn't seem like much. But in reality, it actually was a pretty impressive and important thing. At the end of the day, I had a long chat with Chief Judge Bill Gaubatz, who ran the DC-X program--and therefore knows a thing or two about this type of vehicle. I didn't get to copy down the exact quote, but Bill put into words something I completely agree with: for decades, people have been trying to build a rocket with airplane-like operations; and finally, finally!, we're seeing it. If a pilot takes off and notices something wrong with the plane, he or she has the option to turn around and park it back on the ground, check it out, fix it, and take off again. That's something that's never really been possible with a rocket. On Sunday, Armadillo made it look easy.

Saturday afternoon's window looked anything but easy. Unsure of the exact root cause of their previous failures, Armadillo decided to go for their best remaining engine--the engine that had been previously attached to Pixel, their Level Two entry. Additionally, Armadillo decided to slow everything down a notch. On each previous effort, Armadillo had been running ahead of schedule, and had left themselves a very comfortable margin for return to the Staging Area. For their fourth and final try, they decided to slow things down a little, in an effort not only to make their operations as thorough as possible, but to make the flight conditions for the return flight as close as possible to those of the initial flight.

But they never got a chance to try for that return flight. On ignition of the flight flight, Armadillo experienced their worst hard start of the weekend. The engine exploded, leaving chunks on the pad and throughout the surrounding area. The Mod's day was done.

Shortly before the start of that fourth time period, we'd received a call from Brigadier General Goldfein, the Wing Commander in charge of Holloman Air Force Base. He'd been so pleased with the Challenge, and was so impressed with the progress of the event, that he pledged to do his best to extend the show and offer a fifth time period to Team Armadillo--which, by ruling of the Judges of the Challenge, would have had to be used for a Level Two attempt.

However, when we presented this option to team Armadillo, they made what must have been an incredibly difficult decision. Unsure of the cause of their hard starts, the team elected to forgo a chance at a $1 million check. The 2007 event was done.

Ultimately, the 2007 Northrop Grumman Lunar Lander Challenge will likely be remembered for those seven missed seconds, perhaps rocketry's version of The Longest Yard. But I'll remember other things. I'll remember talking to James Bauer, an Armadillo team member who had brought a huge contingent of family out to the event, who was somehow still able to smile and look on the bright side, saying that he'd had fun, had learned something, and hadn't hurt anyone. I'll remember the voice of Paul Breed of Team Unreasonable Rocket, undeniably upset, as his son told the audience that it was simply wrong that a worthy team like Armadillo would experience such bad luck and walk away empty-handed. I'll remember talking with Chief Judge Gaubatz about those aircraft-like operations, and the obvious way that the insanely well-qualified judges respected Armadillo for their efforts.

So, Murphy may have won this year. We all knew it could happen, even if we didn't expect that it actually would. But I'm still confident. With another year of work from Armadillo and all the others, it's just a matter of time until those big checks get handed out.